[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2025.]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’re looking for a new job, trawling the job boards and checking the career pages of companies you’ve heard good things about. You find a role that looks like a great match for your skills and experience. You buff up your resume, labor over a cover letter, and hit Apply with your fingers crossed.
And then nothing.
The experience of applying for a job only to hear nothing back—not even a “thanks, but no thanks”—feels increasingly widespread lately, and not just in the realm of software and technology. Sure, sometimes hiring managers are swamped with candidates (or simply disorganized) and don't respond to every applicant. But recent research has shown that lots of job postings are ghost jobs: listings for roles that an organization has no intention of filling, at least not imminently.
What’s behind the rise in ghost jobs? Why do companies post them? And how can job candidates stop wasting time and suffering false hope?
What are ghost jobs and why do companies post them?
It’s tough to determine how many apparently open jobs are actually ghosts, because most companies don’t want to admit to the practice (Stack Overflow, for the record, does not post ghost jobs). The Great Resignation and the economic uncertainty of the pandemic years increased the number of ghost jobs, according to a Harvard Business School report. One widely cited survey of 649 hiring managers found that almost 40% of hiring managers said their companies posted ghost jobs this year, ranging from entry-level roles to positions in the C-suite.
This is a problem for anyone trying to understand the job market—or get hired in it. As Kara Dennison wrote in Forbes last fall, “posting a job description without the intention to immediately start the hiring process inflates the true number of jobs in the market and elongates the job search, much to the frustration of many job seekers.” Dennison is referring to the Job Openings and Labor Market Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported 9.6 million available jobs in September 2023, a figure that she writes “left many questioning why hiring numbers seemed so low despite increasing job openings.” The answer, Dennison explains, is that “‘job opening’ [means] something different than what job seekers expect: a current open job that one can apply to and expect to be interviewed for and potentially hired.” Some of those “job openings”—make that a lot of them—are ghosts.
Companies post ghost jobs for myriad reasons:
- They want to hire someone—eventually. The company wants to fill the role in the future, but the position isn’t available yet (for instance, because they don’t have headcount or they’ve instituted a hiring freeze).
- The listing is out-of-date or they’re hedging their bets. They’ve already hired someone for the role, but haven’t taken the listing down. This could be because the hiring team simply forgot or because the company wants to continue attracting possible new candidates in case their new hire doesn’t work out.
- They’re “always open to new people”: The organization is always on the lookout for potential candidates for future roles, whether or not they’re actively hiring at the moment. This was true of 50% of respondents in one survey from Clarify Capital.
- They’re performing economic optimism: The organization wants to give the impression that they’re thriving, particularly in an uncertain economic climate. This was the reason cited by 43% of hiring managers in the Clarify Capital study.
- They’re misleading their employees or instilling fear: More than 60% of companies in the Resume Builder survey who reported posting ghost jobs said they did so “to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers.” Yikes. Maybe worse? Sixty-two percent of respondents said they posted ghost jobs expressly to make their employees feel “replaceable,” a real case of the FUD coming from inside the house.
What’s wrong with posting ghost jobs?
Seven in 10 of the hiring managers responsible for posting a ghost job this year “believe posting fake jobs is morally acceptable.” Ghost jobs may or may not be legal, depending on what jurisdiction applies. But posting a job you have no intention of filling anytime soon—especially if you’re doing it to mislead or unsettle your own employees—strikes most people as a bad thing.
“Ghost jobs expose the uncertainty and lack of transparency in the economy,” writes Dennison in Forbes. People waste energy and time applying for them, following up with hiring managers who aren’t actually hiring, and preparing for interviews that aren’t going to happen. That’s exhausting and demoralizing.
As we mentioned above, half of hiring managers are posting ghost jobs to keep a talent pool at the ready in case of future hiring needs. But from a candidate’s perspective, being on a hiring manager’s radar is hardly the same thing as being considered for a specific position the company is looking to fill on a well-defined timeline.
The same Clarity Capital survey we referenced earlier found that 85% of companies that post ghost jobs are actually interviewing candidates for those roles. If a candidate knows they’re applying or interviewing for a theoretical future role instead of a specific position a company is looking to fill ASAP, that’s one thing. But the lack of transparency rubs most potential candidates the wrong way, especially when they’ve devoted time and energy to interviews. Asking employees to interview people the company doesn’t plan to hire isn’t a good use of their time, either.
Companies that post ghost jobs also risk damage to their reputation, if customers and potential employees perceive them as lacking transparency or integrity.
How to avoid being ghosted
It’s not always obvious which job openings are real and which are ghosts. If it were, ghost jobs would be less of a problem for job seekers. But there are some tell-tale signs:
- Very vague or generic job descriptions. If it reads like a template, it probably is. Legitimate job postings, especially for more senior roles, tend to be very specific about the responsibilities involved and the qualifications they’re looking for. Even if the posting itself is vague, a hiring manager looking to fill a legitimate role should get right back to you with details when you ask.
- You’ve seen this listing before. Legitimate job postings appear and disappear when they’re filled, but ghost jobs (not unlike regular ghosts) just keep hanging around. While it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, a job that was posted a few days ago is much less likely to be a ghost job than one posted several months ago.
- You can’t find out much about the company. If you notice discrepancies like an email address that doesn’t match the company’s website or the absence of a professional online presence, steer clear. At worst, these job postings might be phishing efforts: scams to get you to share your personal information, like a passport or Social Security number, with someone posing as a recruiter.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of looking for a job is how little of the process is under your control. There’s no silver bullet for this type of ghost. In spite of your best efforts to avoid them, you will probably apply for a handful of jobs that turn out to be ghost gigs. So it makes sense to put your energy into the aspects of your job search that you can control:
- Network smart, not hard: In Forbes, Dennison suggests that job seekers network extensively to build connections and get comfortable advocating for themselves. “Strategic networking,” she writes, is “about building the right connections within target companies you’d like to work at. When you network with current employees, you not only learn about real roles that they’re hiring for, but you could leverage an employee referral from your network for a job opportunity yet to be advertised, which is ultimately better than joining the crowd.”
- Become a storyteller: Learning to tell the story of your career trajectory—where you’ve been and where you want to be—is another skill job seekers need. “Recruiters and hiring managers judge candidates by how easily they can illustrate their experience concisely,” says Dennison. This is one reason why interviews and networking are great practice: they allow you to gain confidence by narrating your experiences and demonstrating your hard-won skills and perspective.
- Throw yourself into continuous learning: Committing to learning new skills, even when you have to carve out time from your current job and other responsibilities to do it, is key in a fast-changing, competitive job market like software development. Find social learning communities and communities of practice where you can learn new skills and concepts and get better at what you do.
- Stay open. You never know where you might find your next role. If you’ve always been a product manager, you might be surprised to find you can be successful on an engineering team, too. If you’ve gravitated toward enterprise companies so far, look for openings at start-ups or open-source foundations or small businesses in need of IT support.
Have you been haunted by ghost jobs? Have any insights or experiences to share? Let us know in the comments.